Trevanian and the slice o' life, or McFetridge, Montreal, Toronto, and Hamilton

I'm not sure I'd have compared Trevanian's 1976 novel The Main with John McFetridge's novels had McFetridge not written about it in Books to Die For.  Knowing of McFetridge's love for the novel, and having just finished reading it myself, though, I recognize The Main as an earlyish example of a kind of crime writing at which McFetridge excels: that in which the protagonist's life is at least as integral to the story as are the crimes he solves or commits.

The Main's Lt. Claude LaPointe has a problematic domestic situation and trouble with his boss, as do a million other fictional cops. But Trevanian delves so deeply into LaPointe's inner life, and he so efficiently but fully fleshes that boss out as a character, that the conflicts seem fresh and deeply felt. The same goes for a number of the novel's other minor characters. They may be minor, but they feel like more than just plot devices. Like McFetridge's Toronto novels, The Main offers an affectionate, unsentimental look at the city where it is set. As in McFetridge's Black Rock, that city is Montreal. Unlike Black Rock, The Main lacks a police photographer named Rozovsky,

In what other crime novels is the protagonist's life as important as the crimes he or she solves? In which novels are the alcoholism, troubled relationships, and clashes with authority more than mere window dressing?

 *

Here's a bit of my recent non-crime reading that is ripe with potential for a dark crime story:

"For it is a truth, which the experience of ages has attested, that the people are always most in danger when the means of injuring their rights are in the possession of those of whom they entertain the least suspicion."

— Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 25

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

On the waterfront and elsewhere in Toronto with Cary Watson

Parts of downtown Toronto's lakefront look as if someone dumped the world's biggest, shiniest, most expensive Erector set on the shore of Lake Ontario, put up the Gardiner Expressway to keep the pile from sliding onto Yonge Street, shrugged, and said, "Don't look at me. I don't know what to do with it, either."

I suspect Cary Watson, an occasional commenter here and at other fine blogs, might agree because his novel Dead Bunny is full of mordant, resigned descriptions of Toronto such as:

"We ended up at a mini-mall on Yonge Street, on the southern edge of Richmond Hill, which is indistinguishable from the northern edge of Toronto. Once there was a thick barrier of farms between the two, but now there’s only a gauntlet of big box superstores."

and

"It was pissing rain and the winding road through the development was crisscrossed with tan rivers of mud streaming off the building lots. No one seemed to be working anywhere, and the half-completed homes dotted across the torn-up landscape seemed to make the scenery even bleaker."

and

"the ultra-trendy nightspots mushrooming up along College Street in what was once a Little Italy and is now Italian-themed ..."

The closest Watson's descriptions get to anger is this:

"Highway 7 is a Hadrian’s Wall across the top of Toronto. It separates the city from the land of two-car garages and golf courses named after the natural features they’ve obliterated."

But the novel does not take the easy path of railing against development as a despoiler of all that is good.  Mostly, I thank, Watson has that ability, apparently unique to Toronto crime writers, to observe urban change without rancor or apocalyptic rants. (See John McFetridge's comments on the subject in his 2008 interview with Detectives Beyond Borders.)

It's not necessary to know Toronto to get a sense of the city from Watson's book. Equally accessible are the suspects in the killing alluded to in the title, as reprehensible and pathetic a gang of insecurely macho dickheads as any set down on paper.

But you have to be Canadian to enjoy this line as much as I did:

 "I thanked Carver and left him disappointed that I wasn’t going to stick around for his précis of his projected one-man show on the life of Pierre Berton."

And now, your turn. What are your favorite and most unusual descriptions of setting in crime fiction?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Hammett and Hollywood

Reeder

Waded into a sea of wankers at Toronto's Eaton Centre this afternoon, including one who talked and looked like Oliver Reeder from The Thick of It. Of course, we were at an espresso bar called Aroma, so what does that make me?

***

My favorite part of Richard Layman's introduction to Return of the Thin Man is its reference to Hammett during his time in Hollywood as a "stylish moneymaker."

The volume's two stories, After the Thin Man and Another Thin Man, are not novels but rather Hammett's screen stories for what became the movies of the same names (for which Hammett did not write the screenplays). Indeed, the beginning of the former reads like directions from a screenplay:

"A train whistle sounds as the Chief arrives slowly in the Santa Fe Station in San Francisco. A stateroom in the train is stacked high with hatboxes, and suitcases, books, flowers, magazines, half-empty boxes of fruit. Although it is afternoon, the stateroom is not yet made up."

And that reminds me of Lawrence Block's comment during his interview with Duane Swierczynski at Noircon 2012 in Philadelphia about Hammett as a seminal figure in the influence of the movies on novel writing. Said Block:

"I think it started the most obviously with Dashiell Hammett. He wanted to write screenplays."

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Canada is funny; Ireland is cheap

Here's one of my favorite bits of humor from Tumblin' Dice:

“Gayle looked at him, slumped in the big leather chair, drinking beer at ten o’clock in the morning, watching himself on tv, the old days, and she was thinking pretty soon they’d have to take him out with a forklift, bury him in a piano box.

“She said, `We can’t have guys running around shooting people all over the place.'

“Danny said, no, sure, that’s right, `But once in a while it’s good.'”

Here's author John McFetridge on "The Hono(u)r Killing in Tumblin Dice."

***

is now $2.99 or £1.95 for Kindle! And, never mind this post's title; Absolute Zero Cool is funny, too. And hard-hitting. Mind-expanding, as well, and totally legal. Here, the novel's author, Declan Burke, holds forth on e-book pricing on the Irish Times website.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Tumblin' Dice rocks, rolls, and rules

A blurb for John McFetridge's new novel, Tumblin' Dice, invokes This is Spinal Tap and Elmore Leonard, but I'd add Return of the Secaucus 7 to the list of cultural referents.  Tumblin' Dice is even more about growing into middle age and facing change than it is about fast talking, violence, and life on the road, though it's about all those things, too.

And the change is nuanced;  there's no clear line between characters who accept and characters who reject it. Even the most decisive is plagued by occasional introspection, doubt, and reminiscence. Others act decisively (for good or ill) just when a reader is likely to write them off as hopelessly nostalgic or irredeemably stupid. That nuance makes this an unexpectedly moving book, as close a simulation of what I imagine real life is as I can remember in a crime novel.

Let's meet some of the characters:

• There are The High, a 1980s rock band that reunites and hits the oldies-and-casino circuit, with larceny on its mind.
• There are the Philadelphia mobsters.
• There are the Saints of Hell, familiar to readers of McFetridge's previous books, bikers gone upscale and professionally stratified. The Saints challenge the Philadelphia mobsters for control of an Ontario casino, where The High are booked for a show (opening for Cheap Trick).
• There are the cops from Toronto and elsewhere who try to contain the violence and who cope with a blood-chilling and culturally timely case of their own.

Each of those groups has its own drama and subplots, in addition to its role in the climax at the casino. That's a lot of characters and action for a medium-size crime novel, a lot of story lines interacting in any number of ways, expected and unexpected, kind of like life. But it's funny, it's moving, it works, and the worst thing I can say about McFetridge is that he appears to like Rush.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

A school of crime?

Several crime novels I've read recently share certain features: yearning emotion, stories  at least as wistful as they are tragic, and empathy with characters whatever their orientation on the legal or even moral compass. Some of the books enhance the effect by alternating point of view among several characters.

Most notable to me has been that the emotion suffuses not just the characters but the social and physical landscapes as well. The books are The Wolves of Fairmount Park, by Dennis Tafoya (Philadelphia); Done for a Dime by David Corbett (San Francisco Bay Area); and Cold Shot to the Heart by Wallace Stroby, whose heister heroine ranges fairly widely.

Domenic Stansberry's The Big Booom (San Francisco) may belong on the list as well. Same with John McFetridge's novels (Toronto, Montreal, and those American cities just over the border from them).

Several of these books have publishers, editors, or both in common. So, how many crime writers does it take to make a school, anyhow?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Murdoch Mysteries, or gritty Victorians

This is one I should have got to before now: a boost for Murdoch Mysteries, an atmospheric detective series set in 1890s Toronto.

I don't know much about the series or about the novels by Maureen Jennings on which it's based, but my first experience with the show finds a highly moral hero with a bent for science, up-to-date production values, and a grittier look than one might expect from even current mysteries set in the Victorian era.

Among other things, the series will be a reminder for crime fans that London was not the only city in the English-speaking world in 1890. I'll be off to watch a bit more once I've made this post, and you should be, too.

(An interesting touch is the lack of respect Toronto's rich show Murdoch. This accords nicely with a theory I've read about the late development of the police procedural in English crime fiction. The theory suggests that a police officer would not have made a credible fictional hero because his social standing would not have made him a believable inquisitor of the nobility. ... Another is a chilling rendering of "She Moved Through the Fair," not the first time that Irish folk song has been invoked in recent crime fiction or television.)

***

The protagonist, Police Detective William Murdoch, uses the word criminalistics a time or two in at least one episode. I suspected anachronism, and one source says the word was first recorded in 1943 — decades after the era in which the series is set.

Another source, however, traces the word to the German Kriminalistik, coined by Hans Gross, a pioneer in the field whose work would have been new precisely in Murdoch's time. So I'd call the anachronism permissible. (Gross is a character in author J. Sydney Jones' Vienna historical mysteries set in Vienna.)

***

P.S. A comment below from Murdoch/Jennings fan Iden Pierce Ford points out that my post refers in fact to one of three Murdoch Mysteries TV movies from 2004 and 2oo5, rather than to the television series that followed, now in its fourth season. It appears that I have lots of watching and reading ahead of me.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Author chat and doggie drugs in Toronto

(Lawren Harris, Grey Day in Town, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa)

Toronto must agree with me; today I heard a song by Rush, and I liked it.

***

Spent yesterday afternoon in Kensington Market, a colorful neighborhood that, unlike others of its kind, remains more than a relic. Today it was Greektown (or, simply, "the Danforth") , where signs display street names in Greek right under the English versions. No "This is AMERICA: WHEN ORDERING PLEASE SPEAK ENGLISH" signs here.

Earlier, it was coffee, bagels, and musing about the state of publishing with John McFetridge, and more book shopping at Sleuth of Baker Street. The lunchtime chat generated some panel ideas for Bouchercon 2011.

***

Back chez Brother Beyond Borders, the pace of daily life must be getting hectic because the veterinarian prescribed Pepcid AC for the family pet, German Shepherd-Lab Mix Beyond Borders.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Sports, crime, Neil Young, and everything

This blog has an eclectic group of sports fans-cum-readers: an Irish New York Yankees fan who lives in Australia, for one, and an ice hockey fan in New Zealand.

So, with a nod to the hard-working Craig Sisterson, here is a picture of your humble blogkeeper with the Stanley Cup.

***

And here's the evidence of Neil Young's influence on crime writing.

That's two crime novels with titles taken from Neil Young songs. What other rock and roll songs have lent their titles to crime novels?

(YHBK with Hilary Davidson, author of The Damage Done)

***

Speaking of sports, the protagonist of Peter Temple's An Iron Rose finds himself the de facto guardian of a aspiring teenage golfer. If memory serves, Peter Corris, the godfather of Australian crime writing, wrote a story in which a young aspiring tennis player figures.

Temple especially gets some nice drama out of this: The young man in question has dropped out of school, in part to work on his golf game, and the protagonist wants him to go back. And there you have it: suspense and generational conflict in one neat, subplot-size package.

Any other stories in which an aspiring athlete plays a role?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

There is a town in south Ontario ...

1) Visited Sleuth of Baker Street to hear Hilary Davidson read from The Damage Done and, while browsing, found myself at nose level with a novel called Down by the River. Neil Young has a more powerful presence in Toronto than I thought.

You know those readings where three people show up, and one works for the store and another wandered in by mistake? This was not one of them. Davidson grew up in Toronto and, I think, worked here as well. To judge from the evening's attendance, she is much loved; the place was packed.

2) Saw a copy of Following the Detectives: Real Locations in Crime Fiction on display, the first time I'd seen my own work on sale in a bookshop. This was very cool. And the book makes an ideal holiday gift!

3) Overheard a customer refer to "someone who likes to read x, y and zed." It is a pleasure to be in a country that knows what the last letter of the alphabet is. (Canadians also know that an entrée is a small course preceding the main dish.)

4) Bought Peter Temple's An Iron Rose off a rack labelled with disarming honesty "Expensive British Imports." Would any American shop or any chain store have been that straightforward? Nah.

5) Got up in the middle of the night at my brother's house, took one step down from the guest room, and turned right toward the bathroom. Only the guest room has two steps, so I took a header onto the living-room floor, landed on my right knee, and only the saving grace of a benevolent god prevented the big-screen TV from shattering into a million pieces. The knee was a little tender today, but Nephew Beyond Borders #2, asleep on the couch, slumbered right through the ordeal of his precipitating uncle.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Noir at the Bar: Canadians and coincidences

Bouchercon 2008 in Baltimore included a panel on the private-eye novel at which Declan Hughes offered a ringing defense of the genre. Hughes' passionate theatrics are always a joy to behold, and they did at least as much as the hospitality-suite coffee to jar conventioneers out of their early-morning stupor.

I remember thinking at the time that defense implies attack. So when John McFetridge invited me to quiz Sean Chercover (left) and Howard Shrier (right) at Toronto's first Noir at the Bar, I thought about how these two writers both honor the venerable P.I. genre and keep it fresh.

They do it in some similar ways both small — Chercover's Ray Dudgeon and Shrier's Jonah Geller use computers and databases in their work — and large: both kill where their predecessors may only have felt like killing. Both also shed tears, which earlier tough P.I.s did not do.

The books share other features, too: Location (Both of Chercover's books and significant parts of Shrier's second are set in Chicago). And I don't remember Percocet previously figuring in the work of two consecutive authors on my crime-fiction reading list.

So John chose two well-matched authors. And if my reports on this Noir at the Bar are more disjointed than usual, I realize now that it's hard to take notes when one is asking the questions.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Extra time in Toronto, extra crime fiction

(From left: Sean Chercover, Peter "Deadbeard" Rozovsky, Howard Shrier)

My plane never made it off the ground, thanks to bad weather in my destination of Philadelphia, so I headed back into town to buy more crime fiction and Montreal-style bagels. Today's crime books come from England, Scotland, Ireland and the Netherlands.

On my way back to Sleuth of Baker Street, I saw a fellow passenger on the bus reading Howard Shrier's Buffalo Jump. She was reading the novel for a crime-fiction book group, and she also told me about a local university detective-fiction course that she said had been taught by Peter Robinson, among others.

"You should read this McFetridge guy, too," I said. "And this Sean Chercover guy, and this international crime-fiction blog, for which I just happen to have a business card right here."

Are crime-fiction sirens calling me to Toronto?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Toronto: International crime-fiction capital

Always carry a camera that works. Had mine not conked out today, I'd have posted a picture of an even better subway placard than the one I wrote about yesterday. This one bore handsome blow-ups of the covers of Nemesis by Jo Nesbø, Revelation by C.J. Sansom, Kennedy's Brain by Henning Mankell and This Night's Foul Work by Fred Vargas. All four are part of Vintage Canada's World of Crime series, and the ad's tag line did my heart good: "The Best of International Crime Fiction."

Howard Shrier's novels are published under the same imprint, one reason I was proud to have him as a guest at tonight's Noir at the Bar: T.O. Style (that's not him in the photo at left) along with Sean Chercover. All of us were there at the invitation of novelist/TV writer John McFetridge, who brought along a lively but well-behaved gang of authors and other interesting folks.

I did my second stint as a Noir at the Bar moderator, after October's session with McFetridge and Declan Burke, and I am beginning to realize that I love asking questions. I'll follow with a fuller report once I get some sleep. Suffice it to say that Chercover and Shrier both honor the P.I. tradition and renew it.

Until I can borrow some pictures from my fellow attendees, this post offers a photo of me buying some international crime fiction on Sunday at Toronto's Sleuth of Baker Street. The beard is now gone. Sorry, Arlene.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

"CSI meets the Canterbury Tales"

Always carry a camera. Had I had mine with me today, I'd have taken a picture of the Toronto subway placard that bore the tag line I borrowed for this post's title. The placard was an ad for Grave Goods, third novel in Ariana Franklin's series of medieval mysteries that began with Mistress of the Art of Death.

Based on my reading of the first book, the tag line is appropriate. Franklin's Adelia Aguilar is a doctor from Salerno summoned to England, where medicine is less advanced and women certainly do not practice it, to investigate a series of murders. Her scientific approach does indeed make her something like a twelfth-century forensic investigator. But the main thing is that I saw a big ad for crime fiction on a subway car in a major city. How cool is that?

Speaking of Toronto, if you're within traveling distance of the city's waterfront tonight, Tuesday, come to Noir at the Bar, T.O. Style with Sean Chercover, Howard Shrier and John McFetridge. See you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Sleuth of Baker Street (Toronto)

Had a pleasant and productive Sunday afternoon at Toronto's Sleuth of Baker Street crime-fiction bookstore. I bought what promises to be some good Canadian, Norwegian and Cuban-Canadian books, and I enjoyed the easy, familiar interaction between the shop's owner and customers. More cities should have bookshops like this one.

I also met with John McFetridge to plan Wednesday's first Noir at the Bar outside the U.S., and I took a picture that could win me some free books in this contest at Central Crime Zone.

All told, a well-above-average crime-fiction day, though I seem to have lost an hour somewhere.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

An interview with John McFetridge, Part II

In the conclusion to his interview with Detectives Beyond Borders, John McFetridge talks about immigration, management-speak and the business of publishing.

You can meet John on Wednesday, Oct. 8 at 6:30 p.m. in Philadelphia when he joins Declan Burke for a special international Noir at the Bar reading at Fergie's Pub. You're invited.

(Read Part I of the interview with John McFetridge here.)

=====================

Every great crime-fiction city in the United States – Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, San Francisco – is a city of immigrants. So is the Toronto you write about. How does your Toronto differ from those U.S. cities? How is it similar?

Some of it, I guess, is just the difference between the American melting pot and the Canadian mosaic.

I'm not a very well-travelled guy. I haven't even been to all four of those cities, but I've certainly read books set in all of them. So, Toronto is different in that immigration is different today. When my father's family came from Ireland almost a hundred years ago, they were the typical penniless immigrants and never once went back. Many immigrants today arrive with trades and professions and keep in touch with 'back home' a lot more. Remember when you were a kid, and your parents made a big deal out of a long-distance phone call? Those days are gone.

The good thing about this is that immigrants in Toronto can maintain a connection to their cultures, which I think means that there's less of a feeling of strangeness and of being cut loose from the things that make people who they are.

Now, some people complain, of course, that this makes people less, “Canadian,” but I don't really see much evidence of that. I think people can be many things at the same time.

Your fiction pokes fun at the fatuous gospel of management-speak, used alike by gangsters, businessmen and police. Share your feelings on this subject, if you would.

I do find management-speak funny. But I also see it as a sign of the ideology of the business world taking over everything – even though we know it doesn't really work for even all businesses, never mind for police work – and I like to point that out.

I also find it kind of funny that business sometimes talk in the language of gangsters – all that tough-guy, corporate machismo. I guess it's true, people always want what they can't have. Gangsters want to be businessmen, and businessmen want to be gangsters. Cops make great characters, as they are stuck in the middle like the rest of us.

Many contemporary crime authors chronicle changing cities. You are among the few who do this without bitter nostalgia or a stark anti-developer stance. Why is this? If you can answer such a big question without eating up too much bandwidth, what is your take on Toronto’s changes of the last three decades?

Toronto needs development because so many people are moving in all the time. I like the idea of people moving in. They bring so much to the city. Development is always an issue when cities grow, but I think it's important to be honest with yourself and make sure you're upset about the buildings and not about the people. I like old buildings, and I wish we'd keep more of them, but I'd rather have all these new people, even if it means some ugly buildings and some growing pains.

There are some real challenges in having a city grow as much as Toronto has in the last thirty years – and with the people coming in from all over the world – but it is really a microcosm of what the world is going through, so we better find a way to make it work. For the most part Toronto does work, but we can't simply ignore the stuff that doesn't, and I think that's a little bit of where crime fiction comes in.

Dirty Sweet has a notable similarity with The Big O by your fellow Harcourt author Declan Burke, that of a youngish couple on the run. You also shared an editor at Harcourt, Stacia Decker. I'd like to switch gears and talk about what role an editor's sensibilities have in acquiring, shaping and delivering books.

It gets even weirder. In Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and The Big O, there are women named Karen and Sharon involved in illegal activities who each meet a shady guy named Ray.

The editor's sensibilities are key. Before my books got to Stacia at Harcourt, they were published by a small press in Canada called ECW, run by a guy named Jack David. I really felt it unlikely that anyone would publish Dirty Sweet because it falls between a lot of cracks – it's not really a mystery, it's not really literary fiction, it's not really a thriller. When I asked Jack why he, and my editor at ECW, Michael Holmes, wanted the book, Jack said it was because they liked it. He said, "All we have in this business is our judgement."

For all the big-business, international mega-corporation stuff about publishing, it still comes down to individual taste. Stacia Decker picked up books by me, Declan Burke, Al Guthrie and Ray Banks. I'm absolutely thrilled to be on that list.

In some ways this goes back to that management-speak stuff. The multinationals can use all the techniques from other businesses they want, but the only way to sell books is one at a time. Editors have to trust their own judgement, acquire books they really like, and then hope other people will, too. I don't know if there's any connection to the fact that my books and Declan's were originally published by small presses.

I'm thrilled when people like my books, and I want to thank each and every person. And thank you, Peter, for such a tough interview. I'm afraid it was probably a lot more interesting for me than for people reading this, as I think I learned a lot more about my own books than anyone else will from my disjointed answers.

(Editor's note: Wrong on that last guess, bub. I learned quite a bit about my own city and country from your answers, and I suspect I won't be the only one.)

(Read Part I of the interview with John McFetridge here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

An interview with John McFetridge, Part I

Crime fiction is largely a fiction of cities. Think of Georges Simenon's Paris, Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles, or Ed McBain's New York. And think of John McFetridge's Toronto, because no crime writer in recent years has imagined a city more vividly. In the first of a two-part interview with Detectives Beyond Borders, McFetridge, author of the novels Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and Dirty Sweet, talks about his city, his country and his craft.

(Read Part II of the interview with John McFetridge here.)

(John McFetridge will join Declan Burke at Fergie's Pub in Philadelphia at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, October 8 for a special international Noir at the Bar reading.)
=========================================

To what extent is your fiction a portrait of Toronto? To what degree, if any, do you try to create a Toronto of the imagination, as so many others have done for New York, Los Angeles and so on?

A big extent. It was really my intention to write a book about Toronto. In fact, when I started writing Dirty Sweet, I wasn't thinking about writing a crime novel. I really wanted to write something about what I saw as Toronto's main characteristic – that it was a city of opportunity. Having a murder set things off was the easiest way I could find to then follow a diverse group of characters that all tried to benefit from the situation.

I was after as complete a picture of the city as I could get. The other day a friend of mine paraphrased the science fiction writer, A.E. van Vogt, something about, `Don't save anything for the next book, put everything you've got into the one you're working on,' and that's certainly what I did. And still do. I wrote Dirty Sweet as a kind of last resort – I had been sidetracked by screenplays for years, and that kind of writing is all about compromise and getting notes from so many different sources (producers, director, distributor, in Canada Telefilm give you notes, sometimes a provincial agency, usually a TV broadcaster is in on it, too ... ) so when I finally came to my sense and decided to just write exactly what I wanted, it had to be a novel.

What difficulties, if any, do Canadian crime writers have breaking through in the U.S.? In Canada?

Canadian writers, especially crime writers, I think, often get bad advice, particularly about setting. I had a few agents tell me that a book set in Canada would never sell outside of Canada, and Canada was too small a market to be stuck in. I've always thought of crime writers and their cities, not their countries: Robert B. Parker – Boston, Ian Rankin – Edinburgh, James Ellroy – L.A., Louise Penny – Three Pines, so the country of origin never seemed important to me, but the attitude persists.

I think when people follow that advice and set their books some place they don't know well they run the risk of having a main `character' being underdeveloped. We may also have a tendency in Canada to worry about a shandze fer de goyim, worry about looking bad in front of the rest of the world. All part of that Canadian insecurity thing. I'm still waiting to find out if Canada is mature enough for a warts-and-all look at itself.

So that's the problem getting published. By now, though, I think there have been enough Canadian successes like Louise Penny and Giles Blunt to put an end to the setting issue so, we have the `breaking through' problem. That's just as tough as getting published, I think. So far the breakthrough Canadian writers in Canada have been of the `lone detective solves the crime' genre, like Louise, Giles and Peter Robinson, and they have written very consistent series. Louise started out with a big success her first book, it may have taken Giles a couple or three to really get going, and Peter Robinson spent quite a few years and many books paving the way for the rest. I think in most cases in crime fiction producing a steady supply of books is almost as important as producing really good books. It takes a while to build an audience and to be found by readers.

Canada, as in most things, is somewhat in between the American and British sensibilities, so that complicates things.

I think the only way to approach all this is to ignore it, just not think about it, and write books that you really like yourself. The old clichés are true in this case: write the best book you can, the book you want to read, and then write another one.

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere has multiple protagonists. Why is this attractive for an author? The ensemble approach will naturally evoke thoughts of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels. What, if anything, do those books mean to you as a reader and a writer?

I have to admit to also being very influenced by TV shows like NYPD Blues, The Wire and The Sopranos, which, even if they don't know it, were influenced by the 87th precinct books (I don't know for sure, but I'd guess that [Steven] Bochco was familiar with the books before he created Hill Street Blues.)

As a reader, I still have a lot of the 87th Precinct books to read, but I just read Ed McBain's short-story collection, Learning to Kill, and it's really, really good. As a writer I learned so much from the way the characters are all so well-developed in just a few words and what an incredible eye for a story he has.

Maybe it's odd that TV writers and producers seem to have taken to Ed McBain's ensemble idea a lot more than novelists and publishers. Maybe readers prefer the single protagonist more than TV viewers. I have felt lately that many crime writers are under-appreciated as character writers because those characters develop over many books. Most reviews are of a single book, so the focus seems to be more about plot than character, but taking the series as a whole, and this is even more so for Ed McBain's 87th Precinct books, the characters are very well-developed. Maybe that's why crime writers have to wait till they're dead to get the critical investigations of their work they deserve. The academics have to be sure the work is complete.

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere leaves a number of subplots unresolved. What does this add?

I hope it adds the readers' imaginations.

And, you know, real life is complicated and doesn't always work out, and there are no easy answers or simple solutions, so there shouldn't be in art, either. I thought it would be cheating to wrap everything up. I hope that if anything good can come out of the recent financial crisis in the U.S., it's that maybe we'll start to see the end of the era of offering easy answers to very complicated situations.

The shift in power from Montreal to Toronto is a major theme in Dirty Sweet and a source of pathos, too. I’d like you to talk about that great demographic movement and what it means to you and to your writing.

It's probably one of the most significant and under-written about things to happen to Canada in the last thirty years. I'm not sure if there's irony in it being kicked off by a “silent revolution” or not, but we don't talk about it very much, and almost no art in this country – movies, TV or books, anyway – talks about it at all.

For both Montreal and Toronto, I see it as both good and bad. Montreal in the 1970's was a fantastic place to be. From Expo 67 to the Olympics in 1976, it was all optimism. It seemed like the Canadiens won the Stanley Cup every year, and the Expos joined the National League and improved every year.

When the Parti Quebecois got elected in 1976, things changed overnight for us working-class English. Suddenly we no longer existed. The official government line was that every English person in the province was rich and lived in Westmount. That, combined with a worldwide downturn in the economy, really ended the era of optimism. Montreal seemed to clear out, and immigration dried up. I went to Alberta for a few years, but I returned to Montreal and lived there through the '80's. It wasn't always fun and, of course, I missed the Montreal of the early '70's just like I missed being a carefree teenager with my whole life ahead of me.

At the same time, a lot of those people who left Montreal went to Toronto. At that time Toronto was a very Victorian, Protestant, white city. The joke in Montreal, of course, was that Toronto had no nightlife at all, and that wasn't far from the truth. But that all changed. In addition to people moving in from Montreal – almost the whole movie business that sprang up in Toronto was built by guys like Robert Lantos from Montreal – a large amount of immigration that previously would have gone to Montreal went to Toronto.

So, on the one hand, by living in Toronto I really benefit from that new vibrancy, but sometimes I wonder what would have happened to Montreal if it had continued to grow and become as international as Toronto has.

On the whole, I feel we've come through most of our rather mild `troubles' and now have two pretty vibrant cities, so I see the benefits to both. Two cities of a good size and very different.

For my writing, though, I think it gave me the chance to be an outsider. The movement in Montreal and Quebec was all about becoming “Maitres chez nous,” masters of our own house, and that clearly meant people like me from the Irish working class (and other non-Quebecois backgrounds: Jewish, Italian, Caribbean) were something else. Then, coming to Toronto I was again an outsider, but in Toronto most people are.

(Read Part II of the interview with John McFetridge here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2008